Figure 5.

Apical-to-basal distribution of organelles in RPE cell bodies. Shown are one RPE cell (#06, left and middle panels) and a mean of eight cells (right panel; all eight cells are shown in Supplementary Figs. S1 and S2). All granules (lipofuscin, melanolipofuscin, melanosomes) in the cell body (excluding apical processes) and mitochondria are displayed in an axial projection (middle panel; see en face projection views in Supplementary Fig. S1). The projection view is scaled to match the normalized distance axis in the graph. Organelles are shown as 1-µm-diameter circles. The graphs plot the number of granules and mitochondria in ∼3-µm-wide bins as a function of percent distance from the apical-most to the basal-most organelle (17.4 µm for cell #06). Four quartiles of distance represented by the grid lines delimit three zones of differing organelle content: mitochondria are excluded from the apical-most quartile and granules are excluded from the basal-most quartile, but both organelle classes are present in the middle half. The third quartile of the mitochondria distribution has fewer organelles (represented by a curved indentation), because the nucleus occupies space at that level.